The present invention relates generally to determining shape, and more particularly, to determining shape from differential motion with unknown reflectance.
Shape from differential motion is solved under the umbrella of known optical flow methods. These optical flow methods rely on brightness constancy assumptions, such as assuming that the local brightness of an image point does not change with variation in lighting and viewing configuration (which is obviously incorrect from a physical point of view). Shape reconstruction methods that account for this variation in brightness attempt to model the image formation as a diffuse reflection, which is inaccurate for most real-world objects.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method that accounts for reflectance behavior as an unknown bidirectional reflectance distribution function BRDF, relate it to image intensities and demonstrate and recover the shape.